Have three WINEs this weekend, because WINE 3.0 has landed

Version 3.0 of Wine Is Not an Emulator – aka WINE – has arrived, and offers all sorts of new emulation-on-Android possibilities.

WINE lets users run Windows applications on Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and FreeBSD, plus other POSIX-compliant operating system. To do so it “translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly”, an arrangement its developers rate as more efficient than virtualization while “allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.”

The application’s gained the ability to be “built as an APK package and behaves like a proper Android application.” It’s not perfect: the version 3.0 release notes point out that while there’s a graphics driver, “Because of restrictions of the Android window management API, only full screen desktop mode is supported.” OpenGL support is also present, albeit “limited to the OpenGL ES API that is available on Android.”

Version 3.0’s headline feature is the inclusion of “A significant number of Direct3D 10 and 11 features”. The outcome? Better graphics for emulated Windows applications.

There’s also an upgrade to the assumed default version of Windows, from XP to Windows 7, while registry import/export has been added to make RegEdit more useful. Support for AES encryption’s been added, while hashes are now handled inside WINE instead of using GnuTLS.

A handful of networking tweaks should ensure Web Services keep up with recent innovations, while web pages render more accurately.

WINE’s developers say that once they get around to building binaries, they’ll be available here. For now, a 19MB source code tarball is on offer. ®